


locked in orbit

by yonderdarling



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Genocide, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mild Sexual Content, Murder, Pining, Wanky inclusion of poetry, War Crimes, Wow this is a cheery one, depictions of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-04 08:26:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3044741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yonderdarling/pseuds/yonderdarling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How to become the Mistress, how to be the Mistress, how to control the Master and how to be a husband and wife when you're the last of your kind and mortal enemies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	locked in orbit

**Author's Note:**

> Still trying to sort out a whole load of emotions about the Time War, the Master/Mistress, and the Doctor and the Mistress, who are so married it hurts. 
> 
> A list of warnings - depictions of suicide, drowning, genocide, dying of dehydration, torture (the Master at the hands of the Time Lords), imprisonment and mental instability. For Ilana, on her birthday. Happy birthday Ilana! Enjoy the cheer. 
> 
> Oh, and there's some murdering and planet burning too.

 

"Caged in this savage capital,

We have forgotten forever

The townships, the lakes, the steppes,

The dawns, of our great motherland.

In the circuit of blood-stained days and nights,

A bitter languor overcomes us…

No one wishes to come to our aid,

Because we choose to remain here,

Because, in love with our city,

More than the wings of liberty,

We preserved to ourselves,

Its palaces, flames, and waters.

 

Now another time draws near,

The wind of death chills the heart,

And Peter’s sacred city,

Will be our unsought monument."

 

[ _Petrograd, 1919,_ Akhmatova]

 

 

 

 

\---

 

four

 

o n e

 

one 

 t w ot w othree threefourfour and she's out and she's screaming and bleeding and in rags and cold but she's out she's out she doesn't know where she is where is she where is home where is the doctor where is she where is she) 

 

\----

 

 

The first thing the Mistress did, upon escaping Gallifrey, is swim. This is something the Doctor is not aware of.

 This is a lie. The first thing she did was stagger towards her TARDIS, across millions of light years, where she'd abandoned it on the Silver Devastation. The second thing she did was devour the remnants of the pantry and vomit them back up and scream until she had no voice, and then the third thing was to send the TARDIS spinning towards the region that would become Ukraine, in the Bronze Age. She steps out and staggers but stays upright and the first real thing she does is breathe. 

Earth's atmosphere runs close enough to pre-war Gallifrey and she fills her lungs with the air and walks across a few sloping hills of grass and wildflowers, to find a small lake she's visited before. In the late afternoon sunlight she strips off the stolen navy flightsuit she's wearing and swims. The water is clean in only the way a pre-industrial society can be, icy cold and fresh. She surfaces halfway across the lake, holds out her new pale hands and forearms, watches goosepimples rise on the flesh. Her new thick hair sits heavy on her shoulders - she'll have to figure out something about that. She kicks back and floats and looks at the painfully blue sky with its fluffy clouds. A few grey birds wheel overhead.

 "The Mistress," she decides quietly, and thinks it good. She hums an 18th-century Czech marching tune and lets herself sink. She opens her eyes underwater, watches the filtered light and the little fishes and the stones and the water plants and the universe is hers for the taking. 

They will obey her. 

 

\---

 

People all too often define her by the Doctor. The Doctor's nemesis. The Doctor's rival. The Doctor's former friend. The Doctor's spouse. She would say there's something sexist in that, but it's happened in her female bodies and her male bodies, and in between and always and so it's an annoyance. It's a misguided notion of binary opposites and stars and black holes and fire and ice and white and black and dark and light. 

As if the Doctor's purported goodness is the base standard and all other things are measured against it. Daleks. Humans. Soldiers. Time Lords. The Mistress, the Master, Queen of Evil and Ruler of All (Eventually). The Doctor is good, the Doctor Makes People Better and Fixes Them and he's a father and a grandfather and has the biggest family in the universe. He's the President and he's so wonderful, but she knows.

  In the same sense that darkness is defined as the absence of light, to those that matter (the storytellers) the Doctor was there first and she was there second, and white moves first in a game of chess, and sparks come before the inferno.

 However, as someone very clever (for a human) once put it, light is only the second fastest thing in the universe; the dark is already waiting, ready to greet it. 

 

\---

 

Pale fingers in the dark, scrabbling through a crack in the wall. Something glints.

"Take it," whispers a voice in the language of the Time Lords, the twisted accent of a being who has spent time outside of Gallifrey. "It's no use to me."

The Master watches through the gaps in her fingers.

"I know what you've done before," the voice says. "You can do it again."

The Master is chained to a wall, wrists together, ankles together, but she manages to wriggle across the filthy floor as the gift falls through the crack with a scraping noise, a ping as it hits the ground. She holds it in dirty, cut fingers, a gift from the only ally this side of the time lock. A shard of glass. Her pulses roar in her ears, oneonetwotwothreethreefourfour.

 

\---

 

It's a fact she loves the Doctor more than the universe; she loves a lot of things more than the universe, and she thinks sometimes, she loves much stronger than she hates. For over 2000 years she's shown love through destruction, love through death and dominance and decimation. She's kissing the Doctor and tremors run over her skin as she imagines wrapping her hands around his neck and remaking him anew, golden sparks in the dim light of the TARDIS, rebirth at her hands. 

"I love you more than the universe," he says, later, in Gallifreyan, and she has his blood on her nails and lips. 

"You love a lot of things more than the universe," she replies, and it's true. He moves back towards her, chest to chest, skin to skin, and kisses her again like he's drawn to her, and they are, because without Gallifrey as the counterweight -  

(force equals mass times acceleration, and they knew that when humanity was, as a collective, trying to bang rocks together, and the force of Gallifrey was unrecognised by them, by all)

One does not miss gravity, or oxygen, or water, until its absence. Gallifrey acted as a distant, silent guide, a cornerstone that meant personal timelines ran parallel rather than jagged and criss-crossed, a watcher across space and time that meant she and the Doctor could run rampant across the universe and answer to no-one but the home they'd chosen to reject. 

Without Gallifrey they're the most powerful forces in the universe, heavy with power and knowledge and memory, ability and experience, and the Doctor runs away and sees the stars and the Mistress fights and conquers constellations. 

 

\---

 

Theta, when he was still mostly Theta and only a bit the Doctor, once asked Koschei a question. He faced the yard where his children and wife were playing some kind of chasing game amongst the overlong grass.

"Why blood? Why didn't you just hang yourself? Jump off the tower? Even…poison."

And Koschei, who was almost the Master and not really Koschei anymore, had faced him and smiled like a snake, feeling at the smooth skin of his wrists.

"I needed to be conscious for as long as possible. I needed control over the process."

"You speak of life like it's a disease, my friend. Or a weapon. Something to be controlled."

"Life is a weapon," says Koschei, turning back to Theta's family. "Love is a weapon."

"I can't imagine living without love. I can't imagine living without them." Theta, so young, gestures towards his children and his wife. "I can't imagine living without you, either."

"You can't live without water, but it will still drown you," says Koschei, and walks away. 

 

\--

 

If people chose to define her by her deeds rather than her husband, they would give sweeping statements such as burning worlds, decimating populations, destroying vast fractions of the universe, numbers of people and lives lost in uncomprehending figures. Space and time. 

Billions upon billions. More than all the stars in the sky.

She is conquering Nesputians, a race who failed to support the Gallifreyan war effort until it was too late to be of use.

"And what will you do with our planet, when we're all dead?" one particularly brave one spits at her, kneeling with the rest of her kind. "Burn it, or drown it, or blow it up? What does this do for you? What do you gain?"

The Mistress looks at her, her domain. She lifts a foot, pushes down on the brave one's shoulder until her forehead rests against the floor.

"You die last," she says, and she is a woman of her word.

 

\--

 

This is a memory that the Doctor is unaware of. She is the head of the Archangel Network, Harold Saxon, future Prime Minister and President and Emperor and King of the future New Gallifrey (Neo-Gallifrey sounds so 1990s). The Doctor is young and bright and very, very bouncy and full of hope and wonder and all sorts of stupid ideas that will kill anyone in the end. She strolls through the council estate, hands in pockets and handlers sent to get coffee. 

The Mistress glances up at the flats above, and senses no eyes, and so she slips across to the TARDIS and rests a hand on it and smiles and says, "Soon." It's all so very evil and diabolical and she can feel the Doctor less than a hundred metres away and it makes her skin prickle. In the corner of her mind she senses the TARDIS's confusion and almost instantly feels the Doctor's psyche in response, connected with his ship.

"Mister Saxon, the Prime Minister would like to speak with you regarding the phone network."

"I'm sure it's urgent," she says, turning to her red-faced aide, taking the coffee. "Lovely stuff. Thank you, Annie. Shall we?"

 

\----

 

She killed her first body, because it was stupid. Because it was wrong, because it was dull and full of stupid thoughts and stupid ideas, and the drums but it also wasn't full of the drums and she remembers the life of the drums and without them and now she is drumfree because they took them out but also they were never put in.

Frail first body, wracked with noises and sounds and inability to focus focus focus, especially when Theta was around, but she'd cut open her skin and found the problem and in pools of black blood on the floor they'd found her, face-down and saturated and stinking of copper, flesh, blood and the burning smell of regeneration in too-large robes.

Theta cried, because Theta was soft in those days. Naive and believed in the myth of Time Lords. In a post-regeneration daze she'd drawn a hand across his pale, freckly face and left smears of rust around his lips and eyes, and he'd cried and the blood was drawn in tracks across his skin. 

Her second body was taller by a head, with pale green eyes and a cruel quirk to the eyebrow, and she thought it good. 

 

\---

 

"Is this a revenge mission?" the Doctor asks, when he finds her sitting in the remnants of the Nesputian palace.

She crosses her legs, examines her nails. He walks closer, his footfalls raising clouds of grey dust and ash. They coat his clothes like a suit of armour.

"Bit late for revenge, Doctor," she says. "Avenging a place I hated was never part of the plan."

"You don't have a plan," he says, stopping an arm's length from the throne. "Mistress," and he watches the smile curve her red lips. "Burning is a horrible way to die."

She has a handful of ash, and she lets it fall to the floor. "I know." He watches her warily, two generals on a lost battlefield. 

"I remember," she says, and watches his shoulders slump.

She stands, takes two steps and kisses him, because there's no one else left alive on this planet and they're the only two who'll ever know, and he tastes like saltwater and smoke and feels like reluctance. He stands and lets her, and when she finishes, to his credit, he only takes one stuttering step back. 

"I wish you wouldn't do this."

"I know."

"I don't like being touched."

"I know." She kisses him again, watches the discomfort growing on his features, tension radiating through his body. "I know. But I'm the last. It's my right."

 

\---

 

This is a memory, as far as she knows, the Doctor is unaware of. When she regenerated from her fifth body to her sixth, her throat was slit by her supposed allies, and her bleeding body was thrown over the side of a freight ship sailing the Biqëue Sea. They'd been smuggling a bastardised form of Gallifreyan technology that required her knowledge to operate it.

She'd shared it. That had been a mistake. 

Of course, to kill a Time Lord, a being with two hearts and two pulses, it takes two cuts to two separate arteries for a quick death. The fall to the ocean a hundred feet below had broken both legs and seven ribs and her pelvis and spine and it still hadn't killed her (or him, as she'd been at the time). The Mistress had sunk below the rough waves of the ocean, darkness around her, buffeted about in the swirling blackness. The Biqëue Sea had three times the amount of salt as an Earth Ocean and double that of an ocean on Gallifrey and it burned the wound in her neck and her eyes and lungs as she breathed it in. 

It took three conscious minutes and six altogether for her to die, and her regeneration had been so forceful it boiled the sea under the ship. The first breaths in that body had been the hated, crushing seawater, sending jagged bolts of cold through her chest and nearly made her go from her sixth body to her seventh in record time. Her hands had shot out, claw like and boiled red and snatched at an anchor line and she climbed and pulled, body stiff and dying dying dying and her head had broken the surface and she'd pulled in breaths laced with salt water and steam but she was the Master and she was alive and she'd climbed up the anchor line, clothes torn and dripping, and made her way aboard and killed every crew member she could find. 

 

\---

 

In another time, they're somewhere else, safe and private and free of smoke and decay.

"Say something nice," she whispers.

The Doctor is behind her. He pauses, gathers himself. Wraps his arms around her waist, presses his lips against her neck.

"We're the last," he says, and she shakes and lets herself fall. 

 

\---

 (oneonetwotwothreethreefourfour and she's alive and they're all screaming and bleeding and she's bleeding life force but the president lies dead and cold but she's back she's back she doesn't know where she is and it's so very hot and bloody and the doctor is safe this is what a sacrifice looks like) 

 ---

 

He sees her domain, and what she has done, and he does not think it good. 

"Drowning is an awful way to die," he says.

"You think?"

"I've never. But I know."

The new seas of Braxeloss churn beneath their feet, spraying salt water that tastes of blood into their faces, whipping their hair about.

"They had a treaty with the Daleks to allow them unhindered passage through this system on the flight to Kasterborous," says the Doctor.

"They had uranium and neon mines," the Mistress replies, watching the ocean reach high tide for the first time. "I wanted them. And it was."

"Was what?"  
  

\---

 

"When I went back to Gallifrey," she tells her reflection, because she can barely remember. "When I went back, I killed Rassilon, and I tried to do the rest, and they stopped me." She watches the ripples in the glassy lake, coming from the small, jewel-coloured bugs that walk on the water's surface.

Rassilon had perished in sweet, brief moments of agony, and the Master had turned on the rest of the Council but the guards were outside, they were always outside, and they'd stunned her and sedated her and bound her and gagged her and she'd woken up with wires in her chest and pumps in her hearts and strange metal bracelets.

"They hold in your life force," the doctor, not the Doctor, says, when she lifts her hands, dazed and confused and she doesn't understand she doesn't understand and it hurts, pushing the electricity that wants to escape back down her limbs and making her convulse. She blacks out, wakes up again. Black, light. Awake. Pale eyes watch her through bars when they drag her from cell to laboratory to medical centre.

Gallifrey's war already had a new leader. 

"You're going to work for us," he tells the Mistress, who was still the Master, and remains to be even now, and she chokes on her gag. "And this time, there's no way out."

 

\---

 

She once built an elaborate house of cards over six days and set it on fire on the seventh. Destroying something is always more fun when you've had a chance to construct it and manufacture weaknesses.

 (Prison is also just a very dull place. )

The Doctor finds her on a planet that she infiltrated the government of a decade ago, local time. She worked her way up from undersecretary to secretary, secretary to minister, minister to commissar, commissar to inquisitor, and she thinks it good. All merit, all her own good work. Patience is a virtue. Eventually, once it's discovered they're both double-hearted beings from a planet that no longer exists, they're thrown into a cell to await the arrival of Shadow Proclamation troops.

"They can't tell us apart," she says. "Their sex features are purely internal, and there's five biological sexes on this planet. They literally can't see the difference between us two. We're just Time Lords. Evil, evil Timey Lordy-loos."

The Doctor stops looking so offended, then starts again. "If they arrest me, for your crimes - again, I still remember Clopocrotus, and don't think I've forgiven you for that, because I haven't-"

"You needed a week off and jail toughened Adric up. That boy was annoying as all-"

A muscle starts twitching in the Doctor's jaw. "Let's just escape, please. I don't want to have this conversation now."

She reaches for his hand, remembering that Adric went the way of the dinosaurs, by going…with the dinosaurs, now she thinks on it. He flinches away and paces out the dimensions of the cell. "Do you have anything on you?"

The Mistress pulls some pins out of her hair. "I thought you'd never ask."

 

\---

 

In another time, the Mistress runs her hands through the Doctors hair as he rests his face against her hip.

"You're all cuddly today," she complains. "I have a reputation to maintain." He bites her skin gently. "You! You have a reputation to maintain. Mister no-touching. Sorry. Doctor no-touch."

She feels the Doctor smiling into her skin. "We did a lot more than touching today, I think this technically counts as a step back to base standard."

"You've got stubble," she says.

"You never minded before."

"It's itchy."

In response, he rubs his chin across the soft skin of her stomach, and she laughs.

"I dealt with your facial hair for however long, I think you can deal with mine for an hour." He shifts position, kisses her inner thigh. "I could go shave if you wanted."

"If you leave this bed I swear I'll blow something up."

He moves higher. "A planet?"

"I don't see you leaving. Planets are safe."

"I'm not going anywhere."

 

\---

Some days she feels like her brain is leaking through her skin atom by atom and taking all her memories with it, and those are the days when the Doctor is there and pushes through and touches her, kisses her temples and her palms and holds her and tells her that she's out she's out they're the last and isn't it strange that it's a comfort, being the only ones left?

\--

 

 

"Binaries," she says one day, hanging out of the door of her TARDIS, watching two planets orbit one new sun in perfect opposite alignment. Binaries. Opposites. Dark, light, natural, unnatural. Each planet has two moons which also have perfect opposing orbits. "Orient, Occident. Stars. Black holes. Burning and drowning. Left and right." 

She could destroy those planets with the materials in one of the rooms of her TARDIS, with dozens of options at her fingertips. 

She goes to Earth, the 1940s and assists on the Manhattan Project. Destruction through a fixed point, destruction with an end point and people to watch and celebrate and venerate. She sees the Fifth Doctor there, disapproving of the activity but not knowing of the actors, and smiles, because it is good.

 

\---

 

The Proteides are another time-aware species that chose to turn their back on Gallifrey in the early days of the war. The planet, and its surrounding small Empire is rich in mineral and chemical resources, and she goes with an acidic compound that will both destroy certain element reserves and turn them into a toxic, choking gas.

She goes.

The Doctor is waiting.

"You _are_ on a revenge mission," he says, and she smiles and lets the beaker drop to the ground, where it shatters. Purple gas wafts up from the bubbling chemicals, and begins to eat through the floor.

"What have you done?" he says.

"What does it look like?" she snaps. "There's not enough there to destroy the joint. They'll just get a scare."

"But why revenge?"

She shrugs. "At least it gives me a motive for once. A motive outside of you."

"You just want to see that we're not so different," he repeats, tiredly, and steps back as the chemicals move closer to his boots.

"Are we so different?" she says.

"Can we have this conversation somewhere that isn't being eaten up by what appears to be a HCL-based compound?" 

 

\---

 

Without Gallifrey, the Shadow Proclamation more or less rises to become the ultimate judiciary power of the universe. Where Gallifrey's power came from its refusal to interfere, the mere thought of their presence being enough to cow others into submission, the Proclamation takes delight in prosecution.

That, and bureaucracy. 

There's a warrant on her head for genocides (plural), and the Doctor also (and isn't that a turn on), and for her, threats against planets and galaxies and star systems and almost as a joke, "Theft of vehicle from own race [race currently non-extant, prosecution unneeded, impossible]." Her first TARDIS.

The Doctor's file holds the same footnote. Unneeded, impossible. 

 

\---

 

The Time Lords resurrected the Master in desperation, and gave her 13 new lives and 2 new hearts and two new legs and ten new fingers and she ran through six bodies in rapid succession.

"This war must be won at all costs," one of her guards tells her, as she's bent over a desk, gun held at her temple by a soldier, finishing blueprints for one weapon or another, a galaxy-destroyer or a planet-eater or a dalek-decimator or whatever the war council asks for. 

She's gagged, face scarred from her own escape attempts, legs and non-dominant hand chained to the floor. All costs. All costs.

 

\---

 

They regroup on a small planetoid in the Gui-Qon system. This planetoid orbits a larger planet, which in turn orbits a third larger body. The sun of Gui-Qon is a star in its dying days, casting red light across all the people of its worlds.

"They'll have to evacuate soon," says the Doctor, sitting cross legged under a tree, checking the soles of his boots for acid wear. "The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, actually, is taking care of that." They stare at each other, the sound of a distant river filling in the silence. The Mistress stays standing, feeling her heels sinking slightly into the soft turf. 

"Revenge," he says finally, "Has never been your motive."

"I've never needed a motive. But it's good to have a direction. Did you know, Labaraxans on Girel XI had the ability to make Dalek shell-piercing bullets?"

"We had the ability to make those. We did make them."

"We?"

"The Armory had it. I was in the Armory."

"I was in the Armory too. In a locked ward. First time round. Funny thing about having your weapons factories near a battlefield, it makes it rather easy for the enemy to destroy them."

The Doctor sighs, leans against his tree. "When you sent me to the coordinates," he says, and the Mistress grins. "When you sent me, I wanted to kill you. I wanted to kill myself." She stops smiling. "That's wrong, actually," he says. "I wanted to die. I didn't actually want to - " he opens his eyes, looks at the Mistress, draws his fingers across his own wrists.

"Pull a me?" she asks.

"You terrified me that day. We were barely out of childhood."

"And look at us now," she says in a low voice, and the air briefly smells like a quarry and dust and burning life energy. "I wanted to hurt you. I thought I was going to die."

"You were."

She sits, finally, then lies down and rolls over to look at the dying sky. "It's not vengeance as much as retribution."

"The Shadow Proclamation renewed their warrant on you. Dead or alive. You're one of their most wanted."

"Since when am I not one of someone's most wanted?" There's even a period in 2040 in the USA where she sits at the top of the CIA's most wanted list. 

"Revenge, though. It's not you." the Doctor says. "I mean, potentially, outside of retribution…" and his voice trails off and he lies back too, pretending not to have said anything. 

They stay there in silence, watching the dying rays of the star mingle with the nitrogen-rich atmosphere and xenon gas fluctuations to turn the light cast down on them golden, purple and green. Accompanying the streaks of colour, the smell of flowers and water and earth, the Mistress lets her consciousness reach out and touch the edges of the Doctor's mind. It's the equivalent of brushing hands with a loved one, and the Doctor returns the gesture. 

"I'm thinking of growing a beard," says the Doctor, after an hour or so. 

"I've never seen you with a beard. Except when we were teenagers."

"My Eleventh body tended to get them."

"Why are you asking me? Grooming tips?"

He shrugs. "Making conversation."

"I feel bad, for sending you to the coordinates," she says finally. "It was hilarious until I heard you screaming."

"I wasn't screaming."

She tilts her head to look at him. "Not out loud. But I could hear you anyway."

 

\---

 

Once, when she was younger, and she's forgotten what body, and she knows the Doctor does not know this, she was stranded in a desert for three weeks, and walked out barefoot. Her skin cracked and her lips peeled away and the soles of her feet bled, dried, and bled again. Her clothes were bleached white by the sun.

 Some old hermits had found her, a family of Watarisars fleeing religious persecution from the dominant lifeforms that held the other, less boiling side of the planet, and they'd taken her to their tiny cave, washed her and given her precious water and new clothes and she decided she'd let them live.

 The Mistress had passed out and regenerated and destroyed everything in the cave, down to the family drawings on the walls. She knelt in the ashes, but did not cry. Couldn't waste water. 

 

\---

 

She knows her own brain is still rocky, from the removal of the drums and their nonexistence but also their former presence. She forgot that black holes can't form without being stars first. She knows her brain is still rocky. She built this new self in a warzone, and madness comes naturally there, and imagines blood and stars painting the inside of her skull. It's coming back to bite her.

The Mistress rests her forehead on the cool grass of the Eye of Orion, squeezes her eyes shut and tries to imagine positive ions trickling into her synapses through the gaps in her cells.  

Blackness. Silence.  

Some hours, or minutes later, she sits up and there's a blanket over her shoulders and streaks of rusty blood around her lips and her eyes. The Doctor sits a few dozen metres away, eyes focused on a small TARDIS component he's repairing, occasionally glancing up to check on her progress. She wipes at her face, feels the dew sitting on her forehead like sweat, curls back up under the blanket, facing the Doctor. The sky is streaked with red - sunset.

The Mistress wakes up again in the dark, with the Doctor wiping a warm, damp cloth over her face, cleaning it of dried blood and mud. She lets him clean off her clenched hands, stretches her fingers out and holds them between his palms. A moment passes, the Doctor sending her a brief thought as not to disturb the fragile silence. She nods her assent, and he heaves her up and half carries, half drags her into the TARDIS, propping her up in his armchair. He kneels before her.

"Am I just a negative image of you?" she asks.

"We're not so different, sometimes," he says, "but I don't think you are. But I know you better. At least, I think I know you."

"I feel like I'm orbiting you. Like you're a sun and I'm some barren rock half in the light."

The Doctor shrugs. "Some people might say that."

"What do you say?"

"Since when have you needed my approval, to define yourself?"

She tries to meet his eyes. "We were Gallifrey's wayward children once. What does that make us now?"

"There was a time. A brief time," the Doctor shifts so he's sitting with his back to her, between her legs, and she massages his shoulders. "When I thought that could make me a God. If I was the winner, of the war, surely to the victor go the spoils?"

"What happened?"

"I - didn't win. I did bad things." He leans back until his neck is stretched and throat bare and rests his head on her stomach. He lets her rest her hand across his throat, fingertips on his pulse point.

"You are the base standard though. I'm the negative side of you."

"Then who is the positive?"

Missy thinks, counting his pulse mechanically. "Romana," she decides.

The Doctor struggles up into a proper sitting position again, turns, peers at her face. "Interesting choice," he says, diplomatically. "Why are you at the Eye of Orion?" He barely flinches when she reaches for his neck and holds her fingers on his jugular again. Counts the pulses. Oneone twotwo threethree fourfour.

"Trying to find my base standard again. Positive ions. Why does anyone else visit the Eye of Orion?"

"How did you get out of the war? How did you escape? The second time."

She counts his pulses. "Weaponized suicide."

 

\---

 

If she was nothing but a dark copy of the Doctor, the negative of his colourful image, she thinks love would burn her out rather than ignite her. Then again, the Doctor is tired and some days she wonders if he's a husk of his former self rather than her friend, husband, the last of the Time Lords. 

"I've never burnt out over anyone I loved," she tells the waterfall of Fabushk one night, ten billion litres of water thundering down in clouds of mist and droplets a minute. "But most of them are dead." The mist covers her face and coats her eyelashes and mimics tears. "I think I killed them."

 

\---

 

This is a memory she knows the Doctor is unaware of, and she pushes it through her fingertips into his blood.  

Wide eyes glinting through the darkness of bars as she was dragged from cell to surgery to laboratory and left in the dark again. Pale fingers through a crack in the wall, pushing a shard of glass through, glinting in the light from the fires outside.

At the same time the Doctor seizes her wrist and runs his thumb over the blue veins on its underside and

she is watching her own blood drip and trickle and pool on her lap and at her feet and around her in a circle drip drip drip sticky thick stinking blood and the sickening horrifying dawning that something has gone wrong it hasn't worked oh god it hasn't

 

\---

 

She wakes up in the Doctor's bed, fully clothed but missing her shoes, the Doctor lying beside her, watching, and she doesn't breathe until he slides over awkwardly, eyes fixed on her own. He settles closer to her, his hand resting on her hip. Slowly she feels him moving into the edges of her mind, a warm balm covering over the memories that rise up.

 "You're good," she mumbles, and he moves his hand, smooths her hair behind her ear.

"I love you," he says. "I've always loved you as you, and everything you were." A pause. "Not everything you do."

"That's a lie," she says.

"Would you be the Mistress without destruction?"

She lies still and counts her pulses, counts her breathing and thinks of chess and black holes and stars. "Wouldyou be the Doctor without making people better?"

Silence. Oneone twotwo threethree fourfour. 

"There's more to being a doctor than that." She feels his thoughts turning over like the cogs of a clock. "And there's more to you than just me. And there's more to you than destruction."

"More than the universe," she says.

"That too."

 

\---

 

The fact is this - they unconsciously orbited Gallifrey, two bodies locked in a path they couldn't escape because they never questioned it. The Doctor and the Mistress are and were rebel Time Lords and how can you be a rebel when the system is gone and how can you be a Time Lord when the domain is lost? 

Noninterference is (was) the way of the Time Lords, and so they chose interference. Exploration and interaction, domination and mastery of all. Intense love and intense control. She and the Doctor were defined in opposition to Time Lords, and she is defined as the Doctor's darker binary. Simplistic species tend to fall into binary thinking. Two hands, two eyes, two legs, two halves of a brain, two kidneys and they think of things in twos. Tri-legged aliens split concepts into thirds, and so on.  

Gallifreyans had two hearts and thought in terms of Time Lords and the rest, but she and the Doctor can see all shades of grey.

 

\----

 

She presses the heel of her shoe into the throat of the last remaining vault guard. His fellows lie in various states of disintegration around them, the smell of ash filling the room. He cries, peering up at her. 

"Please," he says. "Please, I have a family."

"Do you know who I am?"

He takes a shuddering breath. "I have a family."

"Do you know who I am?"

Another few breaths, the man painfully aware they will be his last. "You're the Mistress?"

"What do I do?"

"You destroy."

"Do I care about your family?"

He chokes on his own spit and sobs.

She presses her boot harder. "Do you know why I need these diamonds?" His face is turning glossy, his lips going blue. Beads of sweat pop out on his forehead. "A focusing ray. I could go elsewhere, but who said the Earth is off limits? And UNIT laid them all out so nice and pretty for me. A girl's best friend."

The Mistress watches the guard choke into unconsciousness, and then takes his gun and radio and phone and pockets them, turning her attention to the vault door. 

"The French are glad to die for love," she sings, feeling the eyes of the security camera on her as she unlocks the door in seconds. 

 

\---

 

She's bled out more than once, and that is awful way to die. She's burned, drowned, died of old age, forced regenerations, executions, stabbing, falling, electrocution, suicide by blood and suicide by fire and by space and suicide, proper death, no coming back, dying dying dead, by the Doctor for the Doctor (or so she thought). 

"I've died for you," she tells the universe, a message for the Doctor. The universe does not answer, so she goes to the Doctor, who sits in a cafe in Paris, waiting for his former self to run by. 

 She joins him in the shade of an umbrella, takes a bite of the eclair that's waiting for her.

"Fourth body," he says. "And Romana."

"Do you do this often?" she says, watching his hands, loose fists on the table.

"I didn't see her at the end of the war. She vanished." The hands go under the table, rest on his jittering knees. "Thought she died."

The Mistress nods. "I came here to tell you something."

"Did you? What is it?" 

"Husband," she begins, and then holds her breath as the Fourth Doctor and a woman in a schoolgirl's outfit sprint by. They watch them until they round the corner at the end of the street, smiles bright on their faces. "Husband."

"Wife," says the Doctor. "I already knew that much."

"I love you," she reminds him, and Paris moves by. He watches the city, which she's never been really fond of. His eyes scan the sky. The Doctor places his hands on the table again, pulls his chair closer, fidgets, finally looks at her.

"Do I need to say it back?"

"Is it true?"

"Yes. It's true," he says. "But I can't. I can't say it."

She nods, feels the Doctor resting one of his hands over her own, folded neatly in her lap.

"We're the most powerful beings in the universe," she says. "We can do whatever we want."

"That's true too."

 

\---

 

At another time, she and the Doctor have another conversation in bed, because they're married and the last of the Time Lords with all the time in the universe to be married and be the last of the Time Lords.

"I can't believe you grew a beard," she says. 

"I can go, right now, if you want." 

The Mistress grabs the Doctor around the waist as he tries to sit up, pulls him back down and leans on his chest.

"You're not going anywhere."

He runs his hands along her bare back, fingers splayed. "Not planning on it. That's a fact."

She kisses him along the jaw, along his neck, watching her lipstick mark his skin with red. He rests his hands in the curve of her waist. The Mistress runs her lips back up to the shell of his right ear, kisses the skin behind it.

"Universe," she whispers in Gallifreyan, one of its older, higher dialects, and feels his nails dig in. 

 

\---

She goes swimming in Stingray Harbor the day before British ships are due to arrive and watches the smoke of the cooking fires of the local people drift up into the blue of the sky. The Mistress licks the taste of salt and blood off her lips and wonders if she can make herself warn them.

\--

 

People define her in comparison to the Doctor, but what they don't know is this-

 They meet on a planet, and there's red grass but a purple sky, and he's the one to pull her aboard his TARDIS. He's the one who makes himself to reach out, runs his thumbs over her cheekbones. He's the one who cups her face in his hands, feels her pulses thrumming under her skin with his fingertips. His touch is like an electric shock. He divests her of her coat, and takes off his own, leaving him in some ridiculous jumper with holes. 

"You can't fix me," she says. 

"I'm not fixing you," he says, and the TARDIS starts to play some warbled waltz from 1920s Berlin. "I'm dancing with my wife." He places a hand on her waist, barely touching and guides hers to the right positions. 

"This won't make me better," she says, as he steps off, the music echoing in the console room. She follows his lead, fixing her gaze on his shirtfront.

"It might make things better for a three-minute song," he replies.

"This isn't like the dancing at home."

The Doctor quirks one corner of his mouth up, concentrating on his feet, slowly manoeuvring them around the console.

"We're out of time."

"Missy-"

"Quiet, I'm trying to dance with my husband," she says, and lets him spin her slowly, pressing their bodies back together when she returns. She loops her arms around his neck, rests her cheek on his shoulder. His hands move, and one arm encircles her waist while another crosses her back. Secure. They stay like that, swaying to the music until one song ends and another begins. 

"Are you awake?" he asks eventually, sliding his hands up her arms to rest on her shoulders. Missy makes a noise of assent, tilts her head back to peer up at him from under heavy eyelids. His face is unguarded, old and tired, but it's warm and she lets her eyes slide shut as he kisses her forehead, kisses each of her eyelids, her cheeks, then finally her mouth. 

"Better?" he says against her lips.

She rests one hand against each of his hearts, feels them beating, steady, centring. 

"For now," she replies. 

 

\---

 

The first time, the Time Lords came to her in the cells, reborn and new and fresh and broken, and told her what they wanted the Cruciform to be, and she agreed, smiling and nodding and asking for pencil and paper and slide-rule and stanley knife. She draws blueprints and makes notes until they leave, nodding and smiling, and they lock the door, and she bites down on the pencil and then she cuts her own fingers off without a whimper.

 The guards find her and execute her, forcing her into a new body before she can even die in her own time.

 

\---

 

Years later, a war later, freedom, the Mistress destroys a system of planets that laid down arms for Dalek mercy on their way through, and were razed by the Emperor's fleet. What they rebuilt, she brings down with fire and rain and merciless abandon. The Doctor finds her in the ashes, and walks by when she reaches for his ankle.

"I once told you," he says, and it's in the language of the Time Lords, ancient and triggering and fearful. "That you could be so beautiful. But all you do is kill. All you do is destroy. Why?"

"You love me," she says. "You do. You love me."

"I do. What does that make me?"

"More than the universe."

"To you, maybe." He's behind her, grabs her roughly under the arms and makes her stand. "We're the last of the Time Lords. How can you live with yourself?"

"The most powerful beings in the universe," she says, turning. He looks at her sadly, and they match, sad damp eyes in pale faces, covered in ashes. "We can do whatever we want."

"Then we should be better," he says, and she runs a finger across his lips, leaving a stripe of rust-red blood like a gag. "We both should be better."

"I've been the Master so long, I don't know how to be anything else."

The Doctor makes a clicking noise in the back of his throat, perhaps the beginning of a 'K' sound, and the Mistress flinches like he's slapped her. The Doctor shakes his head and walks away and leaves her in the ruins of a system that was once the home of millions.

 

\---  


 Even within Gallifrey she was a last resort. The Doctor, not so much. He was the prodigal son, yes, but he went out to the stars with a promise to come back, one day, yes, he would come back. And he did, voluntarily and not so much, but he went back home to help. And when Romana asked him to join the fight against the Daleks, of course he did.  

The Mistress remembers being reborn from the Matrix, screaming as 13 extra lives were forced under her new skin and orders hammered into her new skull and armour nailed over her new limbs. Orders taken orders given build us a weapon that will win us the war. If you don't we'll do nothing for you because you have no choice. She screamed and fought and shouted until they took out her voice and held her for a week without food or water or light, hands bound behind her back. 

_If you don't, we will kill you and if you don't the Daleks will kill you you have no choice you are our last resort our last child and you will obey us._

And then the Cruciform falls and no one saw that coming and she tears off the armour and run run run runs to the end of the universe because she was so scared her pulse thundering in her ears oneonetwotwothreethreefourfour

(and the Doctor fights on, gaining victories and accolades and the dead bodies of his soldiers, force equals mass times acceleration and she wishes she could have been there to see it)

   
\---

  
 The Mistress wakes up, head pillowed on the Doctor's chest, one of his hands in the small of her back and the other resting on her thigh. She blinks slowly, peering up at him.

"Bet you're really regretting this right now," she says, in a sleep-rough voice. She watches the pulse in his neck, the tightening of his jaw.

"Oh, yeah. Well," he says, looking down at her, gazing up back up at the ceiling. "I'm not entirely certain how we ended up here."

The Mistress runs her red nails over his chest, rests them on his ribs. "Kamanush auctions. We were both bidding on a Yzig ship component that can be altered to fit a time rotor with the right tools. And then when I won, you said you had a proposition, and I said I had a better idea."

"This was," the Doctor says, rubbing slow circles on her back, "probably a better idea than what I had in mind."

"Hmm," says the Mistress, and shuts her eyes again.

"My proposition…" says the Doctor.

"Something to do with my crazy," she says into his skin, kisses along his chest. "Or my trauma."

"Actually no, but." His hand comes up, fingers brush her cheekbone, tilts her head until she's facing him. "You will tell me, one day, won't you? What they did to you during the war?"

"You know what I did during the war."

"I know what they made you _do_ ," he says, his voice low. "I don't know how they made you do _it_."

"So you fought willingly?" she asks.

"As willingly as you can when someone makes you," he says, and then pushes at her. "My legs have gone numb."

They shift until they're lying face to face. Missy pulls the sheet up until it covers their heads.

"Once, I was smuggling things across the Biqëue Sea," she says. "And they threw me overboard. It took nine minutes to die and I remember three of them, and I killed everyone on that boat when I returned. And one of them said to me, 'you know, your husband wouldn't approve.' I tore his throat out with my bare hands."

The Doctor's face twists.

"One day I'll tell you, when you don't do that thing where you're all grouchy and disapprove when you're confronted with violence." she says, watching his eyes. "But what is your proposition?"

He surges forward and kisses her, waits till her eyes shut and then pulls away gently. He stays close, lips brushing hers as he speaks.

"I don't like it when you're violent. And I don't like it when you're hurt. Sometimes those things coincide, but whatever they must have done was unacceptable. Is."

"Your proposal," she says. "Proposition. Whatever."

The Doctor keeps kissing her, persistent without panic, rolling her onto her back, nosing into her neck, pushing clear images of love and peace and light and home into her mind. She winds her fingers into his hair, uses them to pull his head back and stare up at him.

"Doctor." she says. "Proposition."

He shakes his head. "It can wait." He brings his mouth to hers as lightly as rain falling to earth and she closes her eyes and lets her universe shrink down to the last of the Time Lords. 

\---

 

 

 She remembers the feeling of utter emptiness in her veins, the desperate pleas through the wall to say something do something help him help him pleasehelphim _savehim_ SAVE HIM, and trying to see the eyes on the other side when she dragged her hands through the congealing black blood and ooze and saw golden sparks. Sputtering. Dying stars.

" _I'm_ ," she managed to whisper, lips white and eyes rolling back, and her dark, tiny, bloody corner of the universe exploded with life. 

 

 

\--- 

It's a fact that without Gallifrey they're the most potentially powerful forces in the universe, weighed down with foreknowledge and preknowledge and the ability to see when changes could happen and cannot and no one to stop them when they decide to change what they've seen. 

 ---

 

She goes swimming in her lake in the Ukraine, and watches the fish and the birds. Her hair is heavy and wet and she considers finding a knife and hacking it shorter. But the sun is hot, she sits on a rock dangling her feet in the water and lets it dry in the bright light, and then she combs it. 

"You look like a mermaid," says the Doctor, coming up behind her. She jumps. "Well, not a real mermaid, obviously. They're extinct."

The Mistress frowns. "I know. That was me. Clopocrotus."

The Doctor frowns in return, flips out the sides of his coat and puts his hands in his pockets. 

"Want a go?" the Mistress asks, holding out her comb. He takes it with a sigh, sits so she's in between his legs.

"Not so rough," she says. "I've been good, lately."

"I've heard."

The Doctor focuses on the task at hand, and the Mistress watches the birds. 

"Can't believe you shaved the beard," she says.

"It didn't feel fair, growing one and you not being able to."

"God, imagine both of us as men with beards. Far too matchy-matchy. Your brother would have loved that."

"I thought you didn't like it."

"Oh, I liked it."

The Doctor combs. Missy waits. She loses patience.

"On Gallifrey, when they first brought me back," she says. "I killed myself, but they wouldn't let me die. I cut my own fingers off so I couldn't work and they executed me so I'd regenerate faster. My blood was still wet on the desk when I got back."

The Doctor keeps combing, though she can feel his hands shaking. "What is your proposition?"

"Find Gallifrey with me."

She listens to the lake lapping at the shore, sees the sunlight glinting from its surface. The Doctor begins to carefully twist her hair into a braid, finding an elastic in his pocket to tie it off. He moves it over her shoulder, kisses the back of her neck softly, rests his forehead there.

"Susan?" she asks, tugging at it.

"Yes. I'm waiting for an answer."

"I'm wondering why you think it's a possibility. I don't know where it is. They're not good and they're not nice," she says. "I don't want to rescue the Time Lords, or help them, or bring them back. This is our universe now. And we're the most powerful beings in it."

"They are our people-"

"However you remember them, that's not it, Doctor. You did this before, last time I was here, pretending it was all maypoles and boarding school and running through fields, and it took the descent of the war itself to make you say the truth. Our families and friends - well, your friends - they're dead. Susan. Your other grandchildren. Your children."

The only sound in the world is the water.

"Doctor?"

He lets out a shaky sigh. "Did you like them?"

"Hmm?"

"Did you," he says, and she hears him swallow, tries again. "Did you like my children?"

She kicks her legs up, swings around so she can face him, cradle his face and make him look at her. The Doctor stares through her with tear-filled eyes. 

"Did you?"

"I loved them," she whispers, pathetic. "I was only jealous they were yours, not ours."

"Let's find it," he says. "Not for the sake of nostalgia. I know-" she kisses him, hands still cupping his face, and his words turn into thoughts. " _I see what they did, and I want to make them pay. I want justice for the commoners, and I want retribution for the warmakers._ " The Mistress pulls away, watches his face. He drops his head onto her shoulder, and she rests her hand on his skull.

"Retribution is just your way of justifying revenge."

"I want revenge for what they did to you."

"That's strangely macho. Revenge is mine to take, in the manner of my choosing." She kisses him on the temple. "In my own time."

"Why were you destroying those who betrayed Gallifrey?"

She smiles, lips curving red against his hair. "I am the Mistress. In my own time."

 

\---

 

This is something she knows the Doctor is aware of:

She is his wife, and was his husband, and his best friend and the other last of his kind, and she loves him more than the universe. She is not a dark copy, but a different path. Not a negative print of his colour image, but a different picture entirely. The Mistress is a destroyer of worlds, a genocidaire and outside of a binary pushed by lesser species. 

She floats in the lake, hair loose and drifting again, the waiting Doctor cross-legged on the shore, attempting to fix part of the communications array of his TARDIS. The sun burns her face and she lets herself sink below the surface, watches the changing lines of light play over her skin. One of the silver fish darts into the black tangle of her hair and out the other side. The water is cold, and the mud at the bottom freezing, because it's still the bronze age and not yet summer, and so she kicks off from the bottom and swims to where the Doctor is waiting. He stands as she approaches.

"We'll find it," she says. "But after that, you let me deliver what punishment I feel fits the crimes."

"I assumed that much."

"Husband," she says, and thinks it good. "Let's go."

 

\---

 

"It never should have come to this," says the voice behind the wall.

The Mistress checks the point of the glass. It's too dull to make it clean and easy, of course, and she sets her jaw, draws her sleeves back and runs grimy fingers over her filthy skin. 

Prepares herself.

 

It hurts every time.

 

(oneonetwo twot h r e e

 

three

 

 four

 

 

\----

 

 

 

They begin their search at the closest black hole to Gallifrey, and watch it for three days as it swallows stars and planets and light, the fastest thing in the universe, and they choose to do nothing, because they should not. On the close of the third day, the Doctor takes her hand and plays music and they dance in the dying light of another star. 

"We're still enemies," she reminds him. "We might be in the same orbit, but different forces are driving us. Always will."

"I love you, always," he says. "And I'll stop you. Always."

She kisses him then, drawing oxygen and water and gravity from his presence, and stars from his lungs, and she loves him too.

"You can try."

 

\---

 

 

 

 

"And it seemed to me those fires

Were about me till dawn.

And I never learnt –

The colour of those eyes.

 

Everything was trembling, singing;

Were you my friend or enemy,

And winter was it, or summer?"

 

[ _Fragment_ , from _Annensky_ , Akhmatova]

 

 


End file.
